Gift Stories

Giving News

With our donors’ help, we’re changing the world. We’re fighting disease, educating leaders, creating a more sustainable environment, leading advances in the computer age, and gaining new insight into the human mind. Every day, your gifts are at work.

A Couple’s Gift Establishes a Unique New Resource to Help Those Who Stutter. Aiming to fill a sizeable gap in U.S. health care, a pair of donors has helped establish the first nonprofit institute within a university setting devoted to stuttering intervention and research. Housed in UT’s Moody College of Communication, it is also the only [...]

Longhorns Go Global to Improve Lives. Public service by UT students takes many forms, but some of the most far-reaching efforts are those that promote economic development and fight poverty worldwide. That is the case with the William H. Crook Program in International Affairs, which awards fellowships each year to support students working on concrete, [...]

The Campus Welcomes HornRaiser, a New Tool to Turn Innovative Ideas into Reality. Students and faculty at UT have great ideas all the time, but the resources to get them off the ground? That’s often another story. Enter HornRaiser, the university’s official crowdfunding platform, which launched in the fall. Similar to Kickstarter, it offers [...]

A New Department Points the Way for the Nation As the first of its kind in the United States, UT’s newest academic department — up and running since fall 2014 — is also the first to directly address a new social reality: the growing influence of Mexican American and Latino populations nationwide. In Texas and [...]

By Courtney Sevener Little Longhorn makes a gift to UT Elementary. To many, pennies have lost any and all value. Most people pass them by without bothering to pick them up. Not third-grader Liesl Geiger. She believes every coin in her piggy bank counts, especially when it can be donated to a good cause. [...]

Laura Bush spearheads a campaign to rehabilitate one of UT’s most important buildings and honor a Texas pioneer. By Jamey Smith Predating the UT Tower by a quarter-century, Battle Hall stands, stately and majestic, as a reminder of the university’s early commitment to creating a campus environment that inspires excellence. But after continuously serving [...]

Reaching a goal is a fine thing. Blowing right by it? Even better. In a sign that the UT community is as generous as it is passionate, students, alumni, and friends gave more than three times the fundraising goal of the inaugural 40 Hours for the Forty Acres.

For the past eight years, the Campaign for Texas has been about people. Students and professors. Achievers and thinkers. Everyone in Texas benefits from a having a first-class university as the state’s flagship, and with each campaign gift made, more people have been able to realize their potential — and to change the world wherever their ambitions take them.

By Jamey Smith With preparations for Dell Medical School moving full steam ahead — ground was officially broken in April — it’s worth remembering that the medical realm is hardly new territory for The University of Texas at Austin. The university is already deeply invested in health-related teaching, offering nationally ranked programs and 24 majors [...]

The Moody Foundation has announced a $50 million commitment to establish the Moody College of Communication at The University of Texas at Austin, creating the largest endowment for the study of communication of any public university in the nation. “The Moody Foundation has made a transformative gift to The University of Texas at Austin,” said [...]

The McCombs School of Business is celebrating two successes after concluding its annual alumni fundraising campaign: raising more than $2 million and increasing its alumni participation rate to 8.1 percent. McCombs alumni came together to raise the money through one-on-one appeals to their former classmates, many delivered via Facebook and Twitter. In all, 6,300 alumni [...]

Michael and Susan Dell, Glenn and Amanda Fuhrman and John and Amy Phelan have donated the Magnum Photos collection to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The collection, containing nearly 200,000 press prints of images taken by world-renowned Magnum photographers, may be the single-largest donation to the Ransom Center ever.

Alumni and friends, engaged as never before, have sent the Campaign for Texas into record territory. But UT needs one more record-breaking year. The Campaign for Texas, the university’s ambitious $3 billion fundraising drive, comes down to a simple idea: making Texas and the world a better place. As UT keeps on doing what it [...]

Dr. Huiping Zhu, a research assistant professor in the School of Human Ecology’s Department of Nutritional Sciences, is a member of the Dell Pediatric Research Institute’s Finnell Lab, a team of epidemiologists, statisticians, clinicians, and geneticists working to discover the causes of birth defects of the brain and spinal cord such as spina bifida.

Call it a portal for progress—or a laboratory for bold, earth-shaking ideas. Either way, when Rowling Hall opens its doors in 2017, its contemporary architecture will support an exciting, modern take on business pedagogy, fulfilling the UT maxim that “what starts here changes the world.”

A new endowment aims to help young women develop skills to succeed With women making up more than half the nation’s population — 51 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau — the need for scientists, leaders in business and government, engineers, and doctors of both sexes is greater than ever. Fortunately for young women [...]

It took the efforts of three different SG administrations—and three friends—to get the footwear on the shelves. The idea for a pair of UT boots was the brainchild of Clayton Stewart. The external financial officer for SG at the time, Stewart was interning at the State Capitol when he noticed lawmakers wearing boots featuring the state seal.

Spaceships hurtling toward you. Touchdown receptions an arm’s length away. Front-row seats at big concerts. These experiences—or at least the illusion of them—are increasingly common in movie theaters and living rooms thanks to 3-D technology. And now UT radio-television-film students will have access to the nation’s first comprehensive 3-D production curriculum.

Burnt orange scrubs—they’re not just for nurses anymore. The Dell Medical School at UT Austin, named for benefactors Michael and Susan Dell, aims to welcome its first class in 2016. And it has the potential to improve the health of people not just in Austin but throughout Texas and beyond by training new physicians and [...]

On March 26, the Applied Computational Engineering and Sciences Building at UT will be renamed the O’Donnell Building for Applied Computational Engineering and Sciences (OACES) to honor the donors who built it.

The new William P. Clements Jr. Center for History, Strategy, and Statecraft will train leaders in the history of national security and diplomacy, honoring the legacy of former Texas Gov. Bill Clements, who mentored a generation of such officials. An avid reader of history, Clements, who died in 2011, left a distinguished legacy of bipartisan [...]

After graduating from her Houston high school, Erin Howell wanted to experience the world outside of Texas and learn more about herself in the process. Already accepted to The University of Texas at Austin, Howell took advantage of the university’s enrollment deferral program and joined Youth With a Mission (YWAM). Guided by her strong faith, [...]

A new home for Liberal Arts The new 200,000-square-foot glass and limestone College of Liberal Arts Building opened just in time for the spring semester, giving more than 10,000 liberal arts students a new home for the first time in decades. Of the $87 million in projected costs, donors contributed $20 million, the College of [...]

Without Planned Gifts UT Would Be a Shadow of its Present Self Imagine The University of Texas at Austin without the Tower. Now remove the following from campus: the Littlefield Home, Littlefield Fountain, Jackson School of Geosciences, and Etter-Harbin Alumni Center. Then pluck McDonald Observatory from the Davis Mountains of West Texas. While you’re at it, [...]

Bold plans call for an ‘engineering epicenter’ at the university In today’s ever-changing world, one thing is increasingly clear: The need for innovative engineers has never been greater. Scientists and engineers make up only 4 percent of the U.S. workforce, but their work contributes to as much as 85 percent of the gross domestic product. [...]

“I knew that coming to this school would give me so many opportunities if I changed my major,” Kaitlyn Bliss says. “I had always been interested in teaching. It was something I pictured myself doing down the road.”

So Bliss switched from business to mathematics and enrolled in the UTeach program for secondary education. Bliss did her student teaching at O. Henry Middle School in Austin.

The St. David’s Foundation’s $2 million grant to the School of Social Work will provide ten $10,000 fellowships each year to bilingual students in the master’s degree program who are preparing for careers as health and mental health social workers in Central Texas. Pictured are members of the first cadre of St. David’s Foundation Bilingual Social Work Scholars.

Do you love books? Want to honor or memorialize someone? Looking for a special gift for a Longhorn? If you answer yes to any of these questions, you’re a prospective supporter of the University of Texas Libraries. The Libraries’ collections are the cornerstone of groundbreaking research, the foundation on which educations are built. From architectural drawings to classical manuscripts, from fine arts and historical music collections to cutting-edge materials in life sciences and engineering, UT Libraries are a treasure trove for students and scholars. New programs are generating funds that further strengthen the University’s world-class collections.

Students at The University of Texas at Austin have been changing the world for more than 125 years. One factor that helps attract the best undergraduate and graduate students — regardless of financial circumstances — is endowed scholarships. What sets endowed scholarships apart from other types of financial assistance? Gifts given as endowments are invested [...]

The National Wildflower Research Center’s mission of increasing sustainable use and conservation of native wildflowers, plants, and landscapes is now finding roots in coursework at The University of Texas.

Sometimes a modest life can make a big difference. Maebess Matthews grew up in Austin living above a shop on the Drag and spent her career as a public servant. But she made some smart investments along the way, and when she died she left almost $2 million to The University of Texas at Austin.

By Lee Clippard One of the nation’s leading computer science departments is a big step closer to having a new, state-of-the-art home, thanks to a $30 million challenge grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation’s investment will be paid as the College of Natural Sciences raises the remaining funds for the complex. The [...]